[SPOILER] Dark Savant graduates from blatant n00b to plain n00b

[Dark Savant]

I think I'd be remiss to not actually provide art for all my dragons.

Glaurung, unlike most dragons, doesn't have wings.



I'm going to declare things called "serpents" but not "dragons" off limits, so no Serpent of Chaos from the Chronicles of Amber, or Apep from Egyptian mythology, or Jormungandr from Norse mythology.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 11 - Part 2

C&D: No score increases and no soldier increases this turn.

I expect Donovan Zoi and Rusten to hit a coin flip for being the founder of Hinduism on turn 13.  Now, if I'd made the "right" choice, I would have researched Polytheism if I'd kept this leader and civ, and I expect I'd beat both of them cleanly, because I could have reached Polytheism on turn 12 by leveraging being able to work the lake.

But it turns out I'm better off having made the "wrong" choice, since I can start growth two turns sooner.  Better to be lucky than good, and all that.  

[RefSteel]

Antigonus is indeed the only possible name for a warrior in that situation, regardless of other themes; I very much approve! But if you're going for a Yeats unit naming scheme (in which case, cool!) may I suggest naming your scout Wandering Aengus? If you're familiar with old short science fiction, you may even recognize the closing lines of the poem thanks to Ray Bradbury. (Who also referenced Yeats in an autobiographical poem of his own: "Byzantium I Come Not From.")

Oh! And for one or two more cities, I almost forgot because it's been so long (I want to go back and read the trilogy again actually!) but the author's shadow recently passed into the Dry Lands, and in memorium, I'd like to suggest at least Orm Embar and/or Orm himself!

[Coeurva]

Norse mythology still has Fafnir (slain by Sigurd), who will have better prospects to get past your job interview, although ormr can mean both "snake" and "dragon" anyway (and is related to Engl. worm, German Wurm; Old Norse regularly drops /v/ before /u/, which incidentally shows that the vowel only shifted to /o/ later), as with many other languages (amusingly, this also applies to "drákos" itself, which originally signified large land snakes, particularly those that constrict their prey, iirc; water-snakes go by "hýdra"). And there is the Ddraig Goch, although his name isn't spectacular. ("Coch" just means "red", and undergoes lenition. Cognate with Lat. coccinus. Edit: Or perhaps derived. The word goes back to the extraction of carmine from certain lice that the Romans called cocci, perhaps a custom locally adopted after their invasion of Britain.)

There is, if desired, the Ouroboros and its estranged sister, the Amphisbaina (also Amphysvaena etc.), which roughly means "one that goes both ways", but they might, again, not qualify. There is the Huánglóng. There is the Zmey Gorynych. There is the Ryuujin (image possibly NSFW: here), ruler of the seas and tides (this latter power was stored in a jewel), from whose daughter Otohime descended the first Japanese emperor. There is the Vouivre (whence "wyvern"), a particular attraction from medieval France. There is the Graoully, who allegedly lived in the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre in Metz, who was tamed by a local bishop wrapping his stola around his neck. In Lithuania, there is the Pukys, a species of friendly house-dragon (Draco vulgaris subsp. lituanica, first described by S. Ramkin), which eagerly apports grain and such for its owners -- usually from their neighbours' storage. And there is, of course, Frau Mahlzahn.

[Dark Savant]

Antigonus is indeed the only possible name for a warrior in that situation, regardless of other themes; I very much approve!

I'm not sure I'll go with a consistent theme at all, really.  Maybe I'll name other warriors after Things That Got Clobbered By Bears, but probably not.

But if you're going for a Yeats unit naming scheme (in which case, cool!) may I suggest naming your scout Wandering Aengus?  If you're familiar with old short science fiction, you may even recognize the closing lines of the poem thanks to Ray Bradbury.  (Who also referenced Yeats in an autobiographical poem of his own: "Byzantium I Come Not From.")

Ooh, that's obvious in retrospect.  I'll do the rename when I play my turn soon.

... searching the Internet for "golden apples" brought up Minecraft before Yeats, Asimov, Hercules, or actual apples.  

Oh!  And for one or two more cities, I almost forgot because it's been so long (I want to go back and read the trilogy again actually!) but the author's shadow recently passed into the Dry Lands, and in memorium, I'd like to suggest at least Orm Embar and/or Orm himself!

I haven't actually ever read anything by LeGuin.  I should probably get around to that.

Right now though, I'm working my way through Sanderson, and boy howdy is there a lot of that.  (... I don't know of any dragons in the Cosmere.)

Norse mythology still has Fafnir (slain by Sigurd), who will have better prospects to get past your job interview,

Definitely planned for, fairly early on (around 7th).

I'll be taking a bunch of names from CRPGs too -- some of them are going to be quite obscure by most other people's standards -- but I'm drawing on everything I can.

although ormr can mean both "snake" and "dragon" anyway (and is related to Engl. worm, German Wurm; Old Norse regularly drops /v/ before /u/, which incidentally shows that the vowel only shifted to /o/ later), as with many other languages (amusingly, this also applies to "drákos" itself, which originally signified large land snakes, particularly those that constrict their prey, iirc; water-snakes go by "hýdra").

That reminds me, I need to make a call on whether Orochi (the Orochi?  An Orochi? ) is a hydra or a dragon.

And there is the Ddraig Goch, although his name isn't spectacular. ("Coch" just means "red", and undergoes lenition. Cognate with Lat. coccinus. Edit: Or perhaps derived. The word goes back to the extraction of carmine from certain lice that the Romans called cocci, perhaps a custom locally adopted after their invasion of Britain.)

I didn't realize that dragon had a formal name ... I'll have to put that on the list.

There is, if desired, the Ouroboros and its estranged sister, the Amphisbaina (also Amphysvaena etc.), which roughly means "one that goes both ways", but they might, again, not qualify

Yeah, Ouroboros counts as a serpent.  Not A Dragon.

There is the Huánglóng.

Already on the list, though I wasn't aware that there were supposed to be accents there!

There is the Zmey Gorynych.

That's one I actually hadn't heard of, I think (though the description sounds familiar, as if I should have remembered the name), but I'll have to consider it.

There is the Ryuujin (image possibly NSFW: here), ruler of the seas and tides (this latter power was stored in a jewel), from whose daughter Otohime descended the first Japanese emperor. There is the Vouivre (whence "wyvern"), a particular attraction from medieval France. There is the Graoully, who allegedly lived in the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre in Metz, who was tamed by a local bishop wrapping his stola around his neck. In Lithuania, there is the Pukys, a species of friendly house-dragon (Draco vulgaris subsp. lituanica, first described by S. Ramkin), which eagerly apports grain and such for its owners -- usually from their neighbours' storage. And there is, of course, Frau Mahlzahn.

I've only ever heard of the first.  I'm not from Germany so I hadn't heard of Frau Mahlzahn before.

Yeah, I'm not running out of names even if I never take more than one name from any one source. 

Let's see.  I don't think the dragon from Beowulf has a name, does he?  (it?)  That's a shame.  Nor does the dragon in the Revelation of John, which is also a shame.

[Dark Savant]

Turn 12 - 3520 BC

Fog-gazing suggests there's a lone tile of flat grass in all that forest and jungle north of Glaurung.  I should check that out just in case it turns out to have a pig or something.



Nothing new found this turn.

Oh, can you guess what happened in the south?



The bear is chasing Antigonus.  

C&D: No new technologies or soldiers this turn.  Someone should be getting Hinduism next turn, and next turn is also the earliest someone can improve a food tile.

Reverse C&D: In addition to knowing that I have Meditation and Buddhism, people can probably tell that I'm building a worker at 8 hammers per turn (which shows as the best rival producing 6 hammers, before the Expansive bonus).

[Dark Savant]

Turn 13 - 3480 BC

I move Wandering Aengus first.



Okay, I'm very probably not planting city #2 on the river.  Also, that lion might get in Wandering Aengus's way, so I might have to swing around Antigonus to unfog the first ring to my west.  I was considering going around the southwestern lake, but I'll have to scout that later.

Antigonus is no longer being pursued by that bear, at least. 

I set Glaurung's workers to the lake and a 3f1c tile; worker (32/60) due t17, Hunting (49/103) due t18.

C&D: Rusten is the only one to research a technology, so he got Hinduism uncontested.  Donovan Zoi might have be researching Bronze Working instead, which strikes me as unorthodox without any of Agriculture, Hunting, or Fishing.  Or maybe he was trying to researching Polytheism at 13 flasks/turn, which seems like a very risky play to me as he'd be at 169/172 this turn and anyone with just a little extra commerce would beat him with no ties.

No soldiers showed up this turn.

[Coeurva]

Already on the list, though I wasn't aware that there were supposed to be accents there!

Tone markers, technically. All Chinese languages distinguish tones, although their number varies; this allows for a vast inventory of monosyllabic words, despite the comparatively (to Indo-European languages, for instance) strong limitations on syllable construction. The standard Latin transcription nowadays endorsed by the government of the People's Republic indicates tones, but Wade-Giles doesn't, for instance.

(I cannot speak Chinese at any sensible level.)

While constructed, the most tonal language must be Solresol. Incidentally, one of the few Disney comics I can remember featured the following riddle at the core of a treasure hunt: "The clue is music: it doesn't speak our language", along with a simple melody; the solution was to read that in solmisation, then Italian: "sol-do-mi-fa-fa-re-la-sol-fa" revealed "soldo mi fa fare la solfa", "the penny makes me play the hymn", pointing to the public music box of the city's clock tower.

Where was I? Something with dragons?

[The Zmey Gorynych] is one I actually hadn't heard of, I think (though the description sounds familiar, as if I should have remembered the name), but I'll have to consider it.

I vaguely recall a German re-telling of the tales of the Bogatyrs (therein called "Recken") at the library of my childhood, and that "Dobyrinya" slew a dragon in the mountains. If I hadn't looked up the dragon's name, I wouldn't have known that (it's "Dragon of the Mountains", hooray).

The Vouivre appears in the Shin Megami Tensei series and I was made aware of the Pukys while in Lithuania.

Let's see.  I don't think the dragon from Beowulf has a name, does he?  (it?)

Like Grendel's mother, he doesn't. You could dedicate a memorial to the countless anonymous dragons whose blood was spilled in any human's quest for immortality. Alternatively, toss up your hands ostentatiously and call the city "The Dragon from Beowulf".

Re CRPG dragons, the final enemy from Gothic II (is that known outside Germany?) is an undead dragon, but I don't think it had a name, either.

[Dark Savant]

Already on the list, though I wasn't aware that there were supposed to be accents there!

Tone markers, technically. All Chinese languages distinguish tones, although their number varies; this allows for a vast inventory of monosyllabic words, despite the comparatively (to Indo-European languages, for instance) strong limitations on syllable construction. The standard Latin transcription nowadays endorsed by the government of the People's Republic indicates tones, but Wade-Giles doesn't, for instance.

I come from an East Asian culture that doesn't speak a tonal language, which I suppose is true for most that aren't Chinese.

The one I do come from ... the South Korean government, about 20 years ago, just came right out and said "ok this is how we now transliterate things from Korean to English".  It is now sort of the standard, but it hasn't found full acceptance partly because if you ask me, it doesn't really make sense to someone pronouncing English as a native language.

Maybe in a few more decades, my own Korean name and those of everyone I know will seem old-fashioned, but they currently very much don't appear that way.

While constructed, the most tonal language must be Solresol. Incidentally, one of the few Disney comics I can remember featured the following riddle at the core of a treasure hunt: "The clue is music: it doesn't speak our language", along with a simple melody; the solution was to read that in solmisation, then Italian: "sol-do-mi-fa-fa-re-la-sol-fa" revealed "soldo mi fa fare la solfa", "the penny makes me play the hymn", pointing to the public music box of the city's clock tower.

I'm always amused by the fact that Disney comics are so much more popular in Europe than they ever were in their native United States.

I don't know how that happened.

Let's see.  I don't think the dragon from Beowulf has a name, does he?  (it?)

Like Grendel's mother, he doesn't. You could dedicate a memorial to the countless anonymous dragons whose blood was spilled in any human's quest for immortality. Alternatively, toss up your hands ostentatiously and call the city "The Dragon from Beowulf".

That's too long, and I'd prefer to avoid something that isn't a name or at the very least a distinctive title.  Names like "Dragon Queen" or "Red Dragon" are far too generic-sounding, at least in English.

Re CRPG dragons, the final enemy from Gothic II (is that known outside Germany?) is an undead dragon, but I don't think it had a name, either.

It's known to me (even if I have never touched it; long gone are the days when I played every single game I could get my hands on), but then again, I pay attention to that sort of thing.  I'm aware we got Das Schwarze Auge: Die Schicksalsklinge in the United States too.

That does make me wonder how much more American culture you're aware of than I am of German culture.

German culture in the United States has (or had) significant penetrance partly because for a plurality of its history, the dominant secondary culture was German.

Dutch was predominant early on, which was a holdover of the English taking control of Dutch possessions during the Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 1600s.  That didn't fade until the early 1800s; Martin Van Buren, the 8th President of the United States, actually spoke Dutch as a first language.  (He's the only President not to speak English first.)

Mexican culture didn't become the predominant secondary culture until about the 1960s.

In between, it's German culture.  (Let's just skip over that Germany as we know it didn't even exist for some of that time. )  The first truly large wave of German immigrants came here during the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848.  That was helped by the fact that immigrating from Europe was insanely cheap during the 19th century.  That's because much of the US economy was based on shipping raw materials to Europe, and the finished goods being shipped back took up little space on the ships, so people could move here effectively free.

The last major wave of German immigrants came to the US during the 1950s.  A large number of these were German women, often coming with US military husbands, there being a shortage of German men at the time.  As you might suspect, these women absolutely hated Russia with a fiery passion.  If you're an American as old as I am, there's a good chance you've met some of these women.

In between, the United States was full of German-speaking people publishing German-language newspapers and eating German food.  You can probably guess the main reason why that died out: fierce anti-German sentiment arising from the two World Wars.  That is actually probably the main reason for the infamous American resistance to learning a second language: anti-German prejudice at a time when German was the most common second language.

Another reason I can think of: the sinking of the General Slocum, which effectively wiped out the German community in the largest city in the US.  (Incidentally, another thing I like to say is that September 11 is not even top-5 for disasters ever to hit the city of New York -- people take the safety of modern living too much for granted.)

I could go on, but I just realized the turn has rolled.  

[Dark Savant]

Turn 14 - 3440 BC (Part 1)

The lion near Wandering Aengus moved here.



That dictates Wandering Aengus moving two southwest, to keep pushing back the fog and to avoid combat dice rolls.

Antigonus resumes unfogging terrain.  I've found another food resource.



It's another deer, in an area that may or may not be a compelling site for a second city.

Boy, this is a lot of trees.  I was going to say that factors in producing any halfway decent wonder after Stonehenge is going to be dominated by whomever reaches the enabling tech first, even for relatively early wonders, but I may only need two chops for the Oracle if I can line up the micro properly.